Open Source & Sovereign New Communities with DIY Energy Solutions

How to make new energy “batteries” that can run the lights, and open source designs for truly sovereign communities — We had an enlivening ThriveTogether Event discussing it all. New intentional communities are where the rubber meets the road with regard to food, energy, education, currency, conflict resolution, security, sovereignty and more.

Here are some excerpts with our special guests to give you a feel for the level of brilliant ingenuity and heartfelt care that people creating intentional communities are making available for everyone.

Audio Transcription

Kimberly (THRIVE): One of the things I especially appreciate is that the whole idea of intentional communities is based on a premise that holds human beings in high regard, as if we actually can work well together and we can live in harmony with the planet, and we can solve problems. Especially, we can honor personal sovereignty and group well-being by addressing what it means to be distinct and unified at the same time. As I’ve said before, to me this is the crux of the matter, whether it’s in our interpersonal relationships, how to stay true to ourselves, honor the wholeness of each individual while being in union with each other, or in any group of any size. I think that’s what it’s all about and I’m deeply grateful to and inspired by those taking leadership in forging ahead with these new communities.

Foster (THRIVE): I said in the movie, and I really mean it, that I really think we’re here on earth to learn how to love, how to master love at all levels. To me, intentional communities embody that probably more than anything that I can think of. The communities that we’re particularly interested in are shaped around loving care — care for one’s self, for each other, and for the land that we live on. This is reflected, and you’ll see it today with the groups that will be visiting with us, that it’s reflected in a dedication to sustainability, to communication, to mindfulness, to spirit, and especially to freedom and an ethic of non-violation or “do no harm”. I want to be very clear right at the beginning for anyone who sees this in the future that we’re making a very clear distinction between true community, which we see as the voluntary gathering of sovereign beings that is an intentional community, rather than the coercion and domination of communism or the deceptive socialist manipulation of what Agenda 21 has taken to calling “communitarianism”. Let’s don’t be confused by similar words.

Jae Sabol (One Community): We’re covering all aspects: food, education, housing, education, for-profit/non-profit business creation. We’ve open-sourced how we set up our non-profit organization. We’re open-sourcing our tax process. We’re open-sourcing everything from growing in-ground to hoop houses to sustainable food infrastructure that can be built anywhere in the world. As well as the housing, the open-source education model has eight different components that cover everything from breaking down and identifying the new paradigm education models that are out there and the key components of those and integrating all those into individual lesson plans. It’s all designed so that people can take it and use it in a way that they want and so that people can participate and make it better. We’re designing it all as a global collaborative so that everybody can add their own ideas into it. We’ve created the web infrastructure already so that as people start taking the things that we’ve developed and doing them differently, we can add those into the global archive of open-source information as well so that it just continues to grow.

Aaron Imhof (Ingenuity Innovation Center): Some of the technologies that we’re using are based on a lot of Tesla’s impulse technology — the John Bedini way of charging batteries. We’ve found methods to repurpose lead-acid batteries with a pickling spice known as alum that turns them into a lead-alkaline battery and they hold about twice the density once you do that. Another thing, since we live here in the Northwest, that’s really kind of amazing is repurposing Piezo electrics. Believe it or not, you can make rain panels, so every time a drop hits the panel, it moves electrons. Another way of actually using that is we’ve found ways with chemicals (through a lot of John Hutchinson’s work) of having a Piezo and then having an active ion chemical to create an infinity battery — a battery that runs forever. I’ve got a four year-old one here on site that seems to be increasing in voltage over time.

It’s really exciting and I’d like to just share how we do that. We have an anode and a cathode that are copper and magnesium and we’ve been doing tests to get away from magnesium and use aluminum; specifically, using old pop or beer cans because they’re already sealed and you can cook the two ingredients together. The Piezo electric is cream of tartar and the active ion is epsom salts minus the water. You cook the two ingredients together and you’ve got a battery that runs itself pretty much forever. Technically, it’s not a battery, but I know some people that have taken this technology and run with it. They’ve made enough of them to make a 12-volt array and then have it, with a comparator circuit, charge a giant cap bank and then they’ll put them in their chicken coops that run a light so you can go in there, flip a switch, you begin to drain from the cap bank the charge that you’ve stored which runs a light for maybe 10 or 12 minutes (but that’s enough to do everything you need to do in the chicken coop), then flip the switch off and it begins to charge right back up again. A lot of these technologies also involve us using energy very differently.

Kate Wildrick (Ingenuity Innovation Center): On top of that, just to chime in very quickly, these opportunities, as people are able to see and experience them, we’ve even talked about putting them into tiny home applications because you can take a whole wall and then create a sustainable solution. The cool thing about that is it’s moving into these new different kinds of economic models where we show our community where the gaps are so that we can get the community involved in supporting it. This really becomes a stepping-stone for helping us support these ideas and moving them out. Even though we may be using traditional commerce, these different stepping-stones around benefit companies and B Corps. become a pathway in and then we’re able to take folks down the rabbit hole around sovereignty.

Sacha Stone (New Earth Nation): We determined to establish the New Earth Nation not as another community model, but more as an umbrella and a platform, which would be the ground of being upon which conscious communities can legitimately manifest for the first time in history. What I mean by that is very simple. The existing models that have been exploring, like Damanhur and Findhorn and so on (and very courageously so), have been pioneers in these ventures. They are still indentured to the State and to the Crown. This is a very important distinction to understand. Ultimately, they’re not self-determining. They’re not sovereign in that sense. If we are to claim absolute sovereignty, we have to be able to know how to how to reverse-engineer the invisible contracts that exist between communities and governments.

The only things that are fundamentally real are people and planet: relationships — (that’s you and me, our family our friends) and the planet that we inhabit (our relationship with nature, with trees and the ocean and the sky). If you really get that and you understand that we have a natural, divine intrinsic birthright, we are directly connected to the source. We don’t need to be asking permission. We don’t need to be filling out forms. We don’t need to be shuffling along in queues. We don’t need to be molested as we go about our business. Our business should be the pursuit of bliss and that is what the New Earth Nation is absolutely determining is our birthright and we are manifesting the platform upon which any number of communities around the world can begin to fold.

Free of any political agenda, and committed to engaging the most pressing conversations, ThriveTogether leads us through the quagmire of input overload into clearly focused strategies for manifesting bold and meaningful solutions.

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